First published in Bloomberg
Law Reports, March 19, 2012
Introduction
Latin America is seeing an upsurge in transactions in the oil
and gas industry, including asset purchases, joint ventures and
equity acquisitions. Much of this is due to significant discoveries
of new oil and gas reserves. The pre-salt discoveries in Brazil are
some of the most well-known, with some experts estimating that the
Brazilian pre-salt may ultimately be discovered to contain up to
120 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. But other Latin
American countries have also realized new successes. Argentina, for
example, has been the site of two recent large discoveries by
Repsol YPF: an estimated 927 million barrels equivalent of shale
oil at the Loma La Lata field in northern Patagonia announced in
November 2011, and an estimated 4.5 trillion cubic feet of shale
gas in Neuquen province in December 2010. Uruguay is also a country
where recent and potentially large discoveries of gas,
